6/28/2014 update: Slow Saturday, thought I’d repost this classic. President Gottfredson and Provost Coltrane have now given former Provost Jim Bean a new job – directing UO’s new “Sports Product” cluster of excellence. We’ve been paying him $245K a year for putting the proposal together:

4/16/2012: Bean and Davis rehire John Moseley

Johnson Hall has two simple hiring rules:

When UO has money to hire either a professor or an administrator, hire an administrator.

When choosing between an open search for a new administrator and hiring one of your old friends with no search at twice the pay, hire the old friend.

… Some faculty members who reviewed the budget concluded that the program was costing the university more than $1 million a year beyond what it brought in, draining revenue from the Eugene campus as it struggles with steep cuts in state funding.

But Bean maintains that at least in the program’s most recent years the UO’s Bend efforts were breaking even. “We have gone to minute detail and passed the spreadsheets around, and some people believe them and some people don’t,” he said.

The Bend program also is tied up with another sore spot among some faculty: the post­retirement contract the UO made with former provost John Moseley. After retiring from his full-time provost position at the UO in Eugene, Moseley since 2007 has been working half time as a special assistant to the provost, acting as the liaison for the Bend program on a contract that pays him $124,000 a year.

The large paycheck for part-time work has drawn the ire of many professors. Moseley will continue in his post through next year, which also is when the UO expects to wind down the undergraduate program in Bend.

So by the original Frohnmayer deal and by this report it sure seemed that we would pay Moseley his last paycheck summer 2011. More than enough money to hire one of the 100 new professors that academic plan has been promising.

But nope. He’s still pulling down $10,372 a month in UO salary – plus another $10,095 in PERS. So how is it Moseley is still on the UO books a year after Lariviere said he’d be gone? Easy: Jim Bean and Lorraine Davis rehired him:

The contract and other emails are here. More on Moseley’s other adventures here.

4/30/2010 update: Greg Bolt has a story about this in the RG. Not much new except this:

Some attention also focused on former UO President Dave Frohnmayer, who in 2005 had assigned responsibility for personnel issues in the athletic department to Grier’s office. Frohnmayer was winding down his presidency when Bellotti announced that he would take over as athletic director. Frohnmayer couldn’t be immediately reached for comment Thursday. But in earlier comments he said that although he had asked Kilkenny to negotiate a contract with Bellotti he had no direct role in those talks. But without mentioning Frohnmayer, Lariviere made clear he wouldn’t have handled the situation that way. “No one negotiates the contract of his or her successor,” Lariviere said. “That’s just part of the culture. Everyone understands that.”

Still no explanation from Frohnmayer of his role, still no defense of Melinda Grier, who worked for him for 12 years. He has been waiting to see the AG’s report, so he’ll know exactly how much of the truth they unearthed, before he goes on the record with his version. “No criminal wrongdoing” is a big relief for Dave!

4/29/2010: Ok, I was part wrong. The Oregon DOJ investigation report rips into Melinda Grier. This won’t get her disbarred – believe me, I’ve tried that – but it is a reasonably well-documented hatchet job and I can’t imagine anyone who reads it hiring her as an attorney. Ever. But of course Frohnmayer walks. For starters:

Oregon Attorney General John Kroger today announced that a Department of Justice review found deficient legal representation, but no criminal wrongdoing in the handling of former University of Oregon Athletic Director Mike Bellotti’s contract.

Here’s the report. It is public because Lariviere insisted that Kroger make it public. Thanks. A key date in the events was April 20, 2009, when Grier was first asked about a written contract and when Frohnmayer was still President. Lariviere was obviously blindsided and had no responsibility for the lack of a contract. The report makes clear he did the best he could with a disaster.

The report does not mention the previous Oregon DOJ ethics investigation of Melinda Grier. That investigation was of false statements Grier made to the US DOJ Civil Rights Division, during their investigation of UO’s minority faculty recruiting procedures. Associate AG David Leith was in charge of that investigation (on which he spent well over $20,000), as well as of the report released today.

I’m surprised at the depth of this new investigation and the vehement tone of this report from Kroger. Somebody is pissed. My guess? David Leith and John Kroger went out on a limb for Melinda Grier, covering up the civil rights investigation and a raft of previous issues. Jean Stockard’s case would be another exmple – cost the state $500,000 plus fees. When this came up, they decided it was the last time she would make trouble for them.

UO’s Public Records Officer, Doug Park, gets off without a mention in the report. Oregon law gave Park responsibility for responding to the repeated public records requests for Bellotti’s contract. Presumably he passed them on the Grier, instead of doing his job. Lariviere has already announced he will take this responsibility away from Park. Good enough. We’ll see if the new GC will keep Park and the other longtime Grier assistant, Randy Geller.

There is not a word about Kilkenny. Dave Frohnmayer, of course, gets off untouched. Still no public word from Frohnmayer on his role in the Bellotti contract, on the firing of the woman who served as his principal legal advisor for 12 years, or on the AG’s judgment that she was incompetent.

4/28/2010:At 11AM tomorrow the OUS Board meets and will hear a report from their auditor, Pat Snopkowski, on the Frohnmayer / Bellotti oral contract scandal – or as they call it in their docket, “A UO Athletics Matter.”

I’m expecting a coverup, based on how the OUS Audit Division handled former UO Provost John Moseley’s golden parachute contract and expense account abuse. But things have changed around here recently, and maybe I’ll be surprised.

In related news, Oregon DOJ spokesperson Tony Green assures me there will be a public report from the DOJ’s investigation of the situation. Though he’d really prefer that I don’t use that word “investigation”. Sorry Tony.

Associate AG David Leith is in charge of this non-investigation. My wild guess is the DOJ will not find much from their non-investigation. A real investigation would likely implicate former UO General Counsel Melinda Grier (wife of Oregon Solicitor General Jerry Lidz), UO Assistant GC Doug Park (officially, UO Public Records Officer, in reality just following orders) and of course Dave Frohnmayer (Saint, former Oregon Attorney General, and currently working at Lidz’s law firm, Harrang, Long et al, while collecting his $245,700 UO sabbatical pay on the side.) Better not to turn over that rock. And Leith has a history of deflecting ethics investigations of Melinda Grier, like this one from last May.

3/30/2010: Since 2006, Oregon’s new Interim AD, Lorraine Davis, has been getting paid half time at a $197,278 FTE out of a fund that was originally intended to support retiring tenured faculty while they taught classes for 5 years prior to complete retirement.

When Provost John Moseley, and VP’s Davis and Dan Williams retired ~2006, Dave Frohnmayer set them all up with generous golden parachute contracts, paid from this fund. All of them are still on the books. Instead of requiring them to teach – as the program intended – Frohnmayer came up with administrative sinecures. Moseley is obviously the biggest offender. Despite an OUS audit about the situation, Lariviere has him on the books as “liaison UO to Central Oregon” (sic). We pay Moseley 1/2 time at a $248,941 FTE to liase from his fishing retreat on the Deschutes – you can rent one of his lodges here. We don’t know what Dan Williams is doing for his money.

From this anonymous email we were sent, it appears one of Lorrane Davis’s responsibilities while “overseeing the academic support services for student-athletes”, as President Lariviere’s email below puts it, actually involved proctoring student’s exams at away games:

Professor XXX,

I am writing to discuss a potential conflict for Student XYZ and thefinal in your course. As you may know, the volleyball team hasreached the NCAA tournament. Depending on the outcome of their play thisweekend, they could be traveling as early as Tuesday next week to theregional site for the next round.

The team will have to win two matches this weekend to continue in thetournament. I’d like to plan as if they will do so.

We have arranged for Lorraine Davis, Special Assistant to theVice Provost and former Vice President of Academic Affairs, to travel withthe team to proctor exams. I am happy to be a contact regarding thefacilitation of preparing those exams to be sent with Lorraine and yourpreferences for how the exam is administered. Or, if your preference isnot to have the exam taken on the road, I would be happy to assist inmaking other arrangements.

By Sunday evening, we will know if the women will proceed or not, and have more information regarding travel.

Thank you,

“Shawn” (name changed to protect the original author)

Academic Advisor & Tutorial CoordinatorSupport Services for Student-Athletes1237 University of OregonEugene, OR 97403

I wonder if $197,278 FTE is the going rate for proctoring exams? Don’t GTF’s earn $12,000? I wonder if we paid her travel expenses too? This is what they mean when they say the athletic department is financially self-supporting? Somehow I don’t think Interim AD Lorraine Davis is going to be spending a lot of time getting to the bottom of that question! I guess the good news is that after she starts collecting the $30,000 a month AD salary, these payments will go back toward real academic purposes – at least temporarily.

The following message is forwarded on behalf of president RichardLariviere -

Today, I am announcing that I’ve appointed Lorraine Davis to be theinterim Athletics Director. She will begin April 20 and serve on amonth-by-month basis until a permanent Athletics Director is selected ina national search. Lorraine has a long, distinguished history with theuniversity. She started on the faculty in 1972 and retired in 2006 asthe vice president for academic affairs. She is an excellentadministrator who already works closely with the athletics departmentteam in her current role overseeing the academic support services forstudent-athletes. She also chairs the vice provost for enrollmentmanagement search, which is expected to be completed soon, and is deputyadministrator of the E.C. Brown Foundation and Trust, a philanthropichealth education organization. I am confident that she’ll be a strongleader at this important time for the Athletics Department.

11/29/2009: We’ve written before about UO Senate efforts to increase transparency by providing a way for faculty to see how the UO spends money. These efforts were motivated by general tendency of the administration to hide spending info from the faculty, and more particularly by claims by Provost Bean that UO’s admin expenses were 38% of our peers, that we were making money on the Bend programs, and by a OUS audit that found former Provost Moseley was improperly using expense money for personal travel. The motion (which passed easily, after someone said “You are asking us to take furloughs. We deserve to know how you are spending our money.”) stated:

The University Senate respectfully requests the University of Oregon Administration to establish a publicly accessible, on-line budget reporting system at the University of Oregon by 15 November 2009 that will allow users to track current and retroactive individual university expenditures as is currently done at our sister institution Oregon State University on their budget reporting website.

Frances Dyke’s office has now put up a reporting system, which any faculty member can use from their Duckweb account, under the faculty menu. However, it is crippleware. You cannot track individual university expenditures, as the motion calls for and as the OSU system easily allows. The closest you can get is annual summaries of expenses and sources, at a very aggregated level. In addition to not being transparent, this is not very useful – for example you can’t use it to check your grant or ASA balances.

The FAC is meeting this week to discuss this issue. There’s no reason UO can’t do what OSU did more than a year ago now – unless there is something to hide?

The first 33 pages are a formulaic rehash of ideas and analysis about enrollments, demographics, and educational productivity cribbed from the usual academic papers and reports. We’ve all seen this many times. Dave’s usual style is a combination of pomposity and vacuity that is hard to miss, but we did run it through UO’s plagiarism detection software just in case – only a few hits. He’s more than a bit confused about the upward bias in the investment return estimate caused by unobserved heterogeneity, omitted variables, and selection effects – not that I’m an econometrician – but it’s still a reasonable effort for an undergrad research paper, and solid B work.

The substance starts at page 34, where he proposes incorporating the OUS schools as public corporations, like OHSU. He says that the articles of incorporation should exempt the institution from having to comply with large parts of Oregon law. Yes, that Public Records law sure can be inconvenient when you are using state money to pay off your buddies. And check out footnote 2:

… I am deeply grateful for the legal insights of former Deputy Attorney General Peter Shepherd and his present colleagues at Harrang, Long, Gary and Rudnick, who have special expertise dealing with the legal status of independent public corporations. …

If the legislature goes along with this plan, what do you think the chances are that Harrang, Long, etc. and their new “of Counsel” Dave Frohnmayer will get the contract for legal services to establish the corporation? Boy does this state need some new blood. And if you think I’m a cynic, check out Lewis and Clark Law Professor Jack Bogdanski’s post. He apparently has some familiarity with the reality of OHSU’s administrative structure. Not entirely promising, it seems:

Yes, let’s replicate the kind of boondoggles perpetrated by Peter Kohler and the rest of the Goldschmidt crew systemwide. Let’s make the U of O public when it wants to be, and secretive when it wants to be, just like OHSU. It’s working so well.

And of course, the Scone, a Goldschmidt man from way back, thinks it’s a wonderful idea.

Just think: Maybe the U of O will soon be opening a research campus in Florida.

And this just in from Greg Bolt in the RG, POTUO Lariviere shoots down Frohnmayer:

UO President Richard Lariviere echoed that concern. He called many of Frohnmayer’s proposals “music to my ears” but said the university community has to be given an opportunity to discuss and debate the plan before deciding whether to support it.

“Many of his suggestions are extremely insightful and helpful,” Lariviere said. “But we’re not ready here at the University of Oregon to engage the Legislature on these issues simply because we have a great deal more consulting on this campus that we have to engage in.”

8/14/2009: We’ve reported before on Frohnmayer’s amazing retirement contract. The OUS board created a new position for him, called “President Emeritus”. He keeps his $245,000 base salary plus whatever the Foundation gives him to top it off, (currently $50K as Knight chair) plus a secretary and a GTF, plus a full salary 1/2 year sabbatical, plus a 90% salary 2 month “study leave”, plus offices in the HC and the law school, plus expenses including travel. In return he agrees to teach one 20 person class per year. Furthermore, when he decides to really retire, UO still won’t be done shelling out the bucks – he will be eligible for the same golden parachute contract that he gave to his former Provost, John Moseley.

Frohnmayer’s retirement package is unusually generous even in the sycophantic world of university boards and administrators. For example, Insidehighered.com has a story on a renegotiation of the retirement contract for retired NC State Chancellor (President) James Oblinger. He was originally allowed to keep his Chancellor’s salary for 6 months, before going back to a regular faculty member’s pay (and duties!). If we read Dave’s contract correctly, his deal is good for as long as he wants it. I’m guessing that will be a really, really long time. Page one says “Further, at all times, Frohnmayer shall enjoy the privileges associated with serving as a tenured professor at the University of Oregon School of Law.” But the contract says absolutely nothing about any of the responsibilities. He can teach a class in the law school someday – if he chooses to do so.

Board Cuts Pay of Ex-Chancellor of N.C. State:

The board of the University of North Carolina System voted on Friday to immediately cut the pay of James Oblinger, the former chancellor of North Carolina State University, The Raleigh News & Observer reported. Oblinger resigned in June under an agreement in which he was promised to be paid his chancellor’s salary ($420,000) for six months, before returning to the faculty, where he would be paid as a professor. The board, amid some disagreement but facing statewide criticism over the exit packages given to administrators, voted to cut Oblinger immediately to $173,000, which is what he will earn as a professor of food science. Oblinger quit amid an escalating public debate over his university hiring the wife of the then-governor. As he quit, Oblinger stated that he did not believe he had done anything improper, but wanted the university to focus on other issues.

Oh yeah – who was NC State’s Dean when they hired the then-governor’s wife for $170,000? Linda Brady, who then left to become UO Provost.

Google Ads – all profits go to buy public records from Dave Hubin

Working GTF Once again, for the tone deaf at JH: Not. Going. Away.: http://deadspin.com/oregon-we-have-the-right-to-access-a-rape-victims-medi-1689196041 – Tuesday

uomatters I'm no lawyer, but yes, they would likely be part of discovery. I think the issue is that the GC's office may not have sequestered... – Tuesday

Lawyer Sounds like a standard "litigation hold" by in house counsel. It would likely be legal malpractice to NOT get these records. Not sure why everyone... – Tuesday

Working GTF If they think they can just wave this story away, they're wrong: http://thebiglead.com/2015/03/03/oregon-accessed-campus-counseling-records-of-victim-allegedly-raped-by-3-basketball-players-to-use-against-her-in-court/ When they accessed those records, regardless of their legal right to do... – Tuesday

Disappointed Duck The question seems to be whether the UO accessed her patient information before or after her lawsuit was filed. Since her initial Jan. 8 suit... – Tuesday

Trickortreat UofO admins, listen carefully and try this - do the right thing. Settle the case out of court, apologize to the girl you so thoughtlessly... – Tuesday

Golly! UOM 2/2/15 "I'm no lawyer, but..." Katie Rose Guest Pryal, a columnist for The Chronicle’s Vitae and a former professor of law at the University... – Tuesday

just different Thanks. Unfortunately, I can't say I feel especially reassured by the UO internal audit charter, which seems to make it clear that the function of... – Monday

uomatters They are digital records. I was given a copy, not the originals. Doug Park panicked when he realized these included documents the GC's office really... – Saturday

I've read a few of these UOM Your 2/27 update is misleading at best. Operating policy (adopted en-masse by the new board) is this: http://www.ous.edu/departments/controllers-division/policies-procedures/ous-fiscal-policy-manual/information-security#.240. You were in unauthorized possession of... – Saturday

Nobody Or Doug Park. Or Francis Dyke. Or Jamie Moffitt. Or Scott Coltrane. Or Dave Frohnmayer. Or all the JH admin sitting around an Ipad at... – Friday

Not licensed What if ... $200,000 a year Tim Clevenger had nothing to show for the $20,000,000 he plans to spend on branding? Page 7, http://trustees.uoregon.edu/sites/trustees1.wc-sites.uoregon.edu/files/field/image/Full%20BOT%20Meeting%20Notice%2C%20Agenda%20and%20Materials%20-%20March%202015.pdf – Friday